Page:Essays in librarianship and bibliography.djvu/122

 102 where men have dwelt from the age of Hercules to the age of Heraclius. The Museum was founded by a great physician; the library, therefore, rests upon a sound substratum of old medical books. The King was the next important benefactor; next above early medicine and natural history, accordingly, comes a stratum of royal libraries from the first Tudor to the last Stuart, each a miniature representative of the best literature of its time. The Hanoverian sovereigns, though no great patrons of letters, were diligent collectors of pamphlets: hence the priceless collection of Civil War and other important tracts which immediately succeeded the donations already mentioned. As the growth of the Museum attracted further liberality ("To him that hath shall be given"), the collection naturally took an impress from the tastes of the private collectors by whom it was enriched. Hence abundant wealth in classics and the early literature of the Latin family of languages, accompanied by poverty in languages which the collectors did not understand, and subjects for which they did not care. When, thanks to Panizzi, the library at last obtained an adequate grant for purchases, the librarian’s own intelligence became a much more important factor than formerly. To continue our metaphor, the contents of the recent strata would be found far more composite than of old, and more puzzling to the intellectual geologist. He would come upon various fragmentary formations, as it were, in which, trifling and remote effects of prodigious causes, he would discern vestiges of the